The excitement around social innovation and entrepreneurship has spawned numerous startups focused on tackling world problems, particularly in the fields of education and health. The best social ventures are launched with careful consideration paid to research, design, and efficacy. This course offers students insights into understanding how to effectively develop, evaluate, and scale social ventures. Using TeachAIDS (an award-winning nonprofit educational technology social venture used in 78 countries) as a primary case study, students will be given an in-depth look into how the entity was founded and scaled globally. Guest speakers will include world-class experts and entrepreneurs in Philanthropy, Medicine, Communications, Education, and Technology. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

The excitement around social innovation and entrepreneurship has spawned numerous startups focused on tackling world problems, particularly in the fields of education and health. The best social ventures are launched with careful consideration paid to research, design, and efficacy. This course offers students insights into understanding how to effectively develop, evaluate, and scale social ventures. Using TeachAIDS (an award-winning nonprofit educational technology social venture used in 78 countries) as a primary case study, students will be given an in-depth look into how the entity was founded and scaled globally. Guest speakers will include world-class experts and entrepreneurs in Philanthropy, Medicine, Communications, Education, and Technology. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

BIOE 376:Startup Garage: Design

A hands-on, project-based course, in which teams identify and work with users, domain experts, and industry participants to identify an unmet customer need, design new products or services that meet that need, and develop business models to support the creation and launch of startup products or services. This course integrates methods from human-centered design, lean startup, and business model planning. Each team will conceive, design, build, and field-test critical aspects of both the product or service and the business model.

BIOE 377:Startup Garage: Testing and Launch

STRAMGT 356/
BIOE 376 teams that concluded at the end of fall quarter that their preliminary product or service and business model suggest a path to viability, may continue with
STRAMGT 366/
BIOE 377 in winter quarter. Teams develop more elaborate versions of their product/service and business model, perform a series of experiments to test key hypotheses about their product and business model, and prepare and present an investor pitch for a seed round of financing to a panel of seasoned investors and entrepreneurs.

CHEMENG 482:The Startup Garage: Design (SOMGEN 282)

(Same as
STRAMGT 356) The Startup Garage is an experiential lab course that focuses on the design, testing and launch of a new venture. Multidisciplinary student teams work through an iterative process of understanding user needs, creating a point of view statement, ideating and prototyping new product and services and their business models, and communicating the user need, product, service and business models to end-users, partners, and investors. In the autumn quarter, teams will: identify and validate a compelling user need and develop very preliminary prototypes for a new product or service and business models. Students form teams, conduct field work and iterate on the combination of business model -- product -- market. Teams will present their first prototypes (business model - product - market) at the end of the quarter to a panel of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors and faculty.

Terms: Aut
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Units: 4
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Grading: Medical Option (Med-Ltr-CR/NC)

2015-2016 Autumn

CHEMENG 484:The Startup Garage: Testing and Launch (SOMGEN 284)

This is the second quarter of the two-quarter series. In this quarter, student teams expand the field work they started in the fall quarter. They get out of the building to talk to potential customers, partners, distributors, and investors to test and refine their business model, product/service and market. This quarter the teams will be expected to develop and test a minimally viable product, iterate, and focus on validated lessons on: the market opportunity, user need and behavior, user interactions with the product or service, business unit economics, sale and distribution models, partnerships, value proposition, and funding strategies. Teams will interact with customers, partners, distributors, investors and mentors with the end goal of developing and delivering a funding pitch to a panel of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors and faculty.

The excitement around social innovation and entrepreneurship has spawned numerous startups focused on tackling world problems, particularly in the fields of education and health. The best social ventures are launched with careful consideration paid to research, design, and efficacy. This course offers students insights into understanding how to effectively develop, evaluate, and scale social ventures. Using TeachAIDS (an award-winning nonprofit educational technology social venture used in 78 countries) as a primary case study, students will be given an in-depth look into how the entity was founded and scaled globally. Guest speakers will include world-class experts and entrepreneurs in Philanthropy, Medicine, Communications, Education, and Technology. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

ENGR 118:Cross-Cultural Design for Service

Students spend the summer in China working collaboratively to use design thinking for a project in the countryside. Students learn and apply the principles of design innovation including user research, ideation, prototyping, storytelling and more in a cross cultural setting to design a product or service that will benefit Chinese villagers. Students should be prepared to work independently in a developing region of China, to deal with persistent ambiguity, and to work with a cross-cultural, diverse team of students on their projects. Applications for Summer 2012 were due in March.

Terms: Sum
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Units: 3
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Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP)

2015-2016 Summer

ENGR 281:d.media 4.0 - Designing Media that Matters

The combination of always-on smartphones, instant access to information and global social sharing is changing behavior and shifting cultural norms. How can we design digital experiences that make this change positive? Join the d.media team and find out! This course is project-based and hands-on. Three projects will explore visual design, interaction design and behavioral design all in the context of today's technology landscape and in service of a socially positive user experience. See
http://dmedia.stanford.edu, Admission by application. See
dschool.stanford.edu/classes for more information.

Social ventures require leadership, funding, expertise, skills and networks to get off the ground, grow and scale. This course will focus on the key strategies for building and leveraging a network of champions to capitalize a social venture at early-stage, and for sustaining and growing that network as the venture grows. While we'll predominantly use social entrepreneurs as a lens, this class is applicable to entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs and social venture champions of all types. Co-led by a practicing venture philanthropist and a social entrepreneur, this interactive, pragmatic course will: n- Discuss the critical financial and human capital needs of organizations and companies at different life stages. n- Explore the concept of champions and the different types of champions including board chairs, co-founders, mentors, faculty advisors, donors, investors, community evangelists, and fellow entrepreneurs. - Learn about effective networks and how to build them, including the role of communications, relationship-building, and crisis management. n- Explore the concept of âpowerful vulnerabilityâ and the art of "influence without authority" in attracting financial and human capital to the mission and making social ventures happen. Special emphasis will be given to developing co-founders and founding teams, boards and funders/investors as champions. n- Develop a roadmap for the ways you will support social ventures throughout your career. n- Meet social entrepreneurs and their champions who promote them within various power structures (major corporations, government, the institutional funding community) to learn about the successes and failures of their partnerships. Confirmed guest speakers include (partial list only): Alexandra Bernadotte, Beyond 12, Scott Morgan, Education Pioneers, Meg Garlinghouse, LinkedIn, the co-Founder teams of Noora Health and SIRUM, Christa Gannon, Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY), and Patrice Martin, IDEO. n- Invite you to join instructors, guest speakers and fellow students for casual dinner on both Wednesdays after class.